German 1101.01 • German I

4 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

  GEN World Languages
  GEL Foreign Language course  
 Introduction to language and culture of the German-speaking world, with emphasis placed on the acquisition of basic communication skills in cultural context. CEFR Level A1. 
Text: Impuls Deutsch 1

German 1102.01 • German II

4 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

  GEN World Languages
  GEL Foreign Language course

Text: Impuls Deutsch 1
Prereq: 1101.01, 1101.02 or 4 sem cr hrs of 1101.51

Continued development of German-language skills and cultural knowledge for effective communication. Emphasis on more advanced language structures, sustained interactions, reading and writing. CEFR Levels A1/A2

German 1103.01 • German III

4 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

  GEN World Languages
  GEL Foreign Language course
Development of skills for independent use of German. Discussions, presentations, writing, & listening/viewing activities that address topics of contemporary German-speaking world. CEFR Level A2. 
Text: Impuls Deutsch 2
Prereq: 1102.01, 1102.02 or 4 sem cr hrs of 1102.51 

German 1101.02 • 1102.02 • 1103.02

Distance Learning option

  GEN World Languages
  GEL Foreign Language course
4 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

German On The Ground series

1 credit unit per online course | Spring Semester 2024

GERMAN 1201.01 (online)
Basic Language Skills
| 1 credit hour; taught in German

Learn basic German language and vocabulary useful for traveling and interacting with locals.

GERMAN 1201.02 (online)
Navigating German-speaking Europe
| 1 credit hour; taught in English

Learn information about the cultures in the countries of German-speaking Europe, and how to navigate a variety of contexts and to interact with the German speakers.

GERMAN 1201.03 (online)
Navigating the professional world in German-speaking Europe
| 1 credit hour; taught in English

Learn information about professional cultures in the countries of German-speaking Europe, and navigate a variety of professional life and contexts and to interact with German-speaking colleagues.

German 2101 • Texts and Contexts I: Contemporary German Language, Culture and Society

Heck  | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

Development of communication skills and knowledge about recent social, cultural, and political developments in German speaking countries through texts, media and film; CEFR level A2/B1. Closed to native speakers of this language.
Prereq: 1103.01, 1103.02, or 4 sem cr hrs of 1103.51, or equiv, or permission of instructor. No audit. 

German 2102 • Texts and Contexts II: 20th-Century German Language, History and Culture

Heck | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024
Heck | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

Continued development of communication skills; gain an understanding of major social and cultural developments in 20th century German history through texts, media, film. CEFR level B1/B2. Closed to native speakers of this language.
Prereq: 2101 or equiv, or permission of instructor. FL Admis Cond course.

German 2254.02 • Grimms' Fairy Tales and their Afterlives

  GEN Foundation: Literary, Visual & Performing Arts
  GEL Literature

Richards | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

In the present DL course, we will be trying to understand the meaning and the enduring appeal of one of Germany’s greatest successes in the realm of cultural exportation—a book whose circulation figures are exceeded in Western culture only by those of the Bible, namely, Grimms’ fairy tales.  This will mean asking a series of interlocking questions.  How did the fairy tales come about?  What were the aims of their compilers?  How do the tales play to those aims?  How do they exceed them?  How do the tales tend to work structurally?  What have their social and psychological effects been?  How have they helped shape—and been reshaped by—popular cultures outside Germany, like popular culture in the U.S.  In reckoning with these questions, we will be enlisting the help of a parade of great critics, including Vladimir Propp, Bruno Bettelheim, Erich Auerbach, and Jack Zipes.
Required Texts:
Jack Zipes, The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
Assigned films will be available at drm.osu.edu
Other readings will be posted on Carmen.
All works in English translation; taught in English.

German 2255 • Postwar Germany and Japan

Reitter | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

In the present course, we will be probing the dynamics of postwar culture in Germany and Japan by looking closely at an extensive body of the cultural material produced in these two most notorious “perpetrator nations”--films, theoretical writings, memoirs, artist manifestos, and, above all, literary works--and by subjecting our material to cross-cultural analysis, which should deepen as our basis for drawing distinctions, comparisons, and connections expands. In doing all this, we will enlist the help of a few secondary resources, most notably the groundbreaking recent efforts of the critic Ian Buruma. Team-taught with faculty in Japanese.
Prereq: Not open to students with credit for Japanese 2255. Cross-listed in Japanese. GE cultures and ideas course.

German 3101 • Texts and Contexts III: Historical Perspectives

Heck | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

Development of intermediate/advanced communication skills; broadening of cultural and historical knowledge through interaction with literary and non-literary materials informed by historical perspective; CEFR level B2. Closed to to native speakers of this language.
Prereq: 2102 or equiv, or permission of instructor.

German 3102 • News and Views: Conversations about Current Issues in the German-Speaking World

Aupiais | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

This course aims to improve your German reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills through an engagement with current affairs in the German-speaking world. The course will hone your ability to interpret, paraphrase, summarize, and critically analyze German-language media content in different communicative contexts. Topics to include: Germany’s labor and demographic crises and debates about migration reform; the COVID-19 pandemic and its after-effects in Europe; debates about the legacies of German colonialism and issues around restitution and reparations; the politics of climate change and energy; currents questions in German foreign policy (including crises in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Mali, etc.).

German 3252.02 • The Holocaust in Literature and Film

Richards | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

  GEL Literature
  GEL Diversity: Global Studies
  GEN Theme: Citizenship for a Diverse & Just World

Why, faced with a historical catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, would we devote a class to film and literature about it, rather than to “the facts”?

HOW YOU SAY THINGS MATTERS

Come find out why.

Taught in English. Prereq: Not open to students with credit for 3252.01 or Yiddish 3399.

German 3300 • The Exploration of Nature: Between Science, Adventure, Exploitation, & Colonization - Topics in German Culture Studies, Social and Intellectual History

Mergenthaler | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

When and why did Germans begin to explore nature in far-away lands ?

Where did they travel?

What did they seek, what did they find?

How did they interact with indigenous populations?

What goals did they pursue?

Explore answers to these and other questions, while you improve your German language skills!

Taught in German.
Prereq: 2102 or equiv, or permission of instructor.

German 3317 • Black Identity and Culture in German-Speaking Europe

Porter | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

GEN Foundation: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Diversity

This course discusses the history of Afro-Germans in Europe and internationally (including, but not limited to, the US, France, Namibia, England, and South Africa). Conversations and questions thematized in this course pertain to identity formation and erasure; systemic racism; Westernization; xenophobia; and eugenics. The content discussed in this course is introductory for the study of race, ethnicity, and gender diversity through the adoption of a historical timeline that spans the 18th century to the present. By discussing a range of texts, including film, scholarly works, and poetry, students are guided through conversations that explore how constructs of race, gender, and ethnicity are established, modified, and negotiated through both official (read: bureaucratic) and unofficial (read: social) channels.

Further, German 3317 provides students with the support to identify intersecting social influences and factors that inform (and often reinforce) the categories of race, gender, and ethnicity. This course discusses milestones in German history where we see significant and often detrimental interaction between the Black diaspora and German-speaking Europe.

German 3351 • Democracy, Fascism, and German Culture

Davidson | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

 GEL Culture and Ideas; Global Studies 
 GEN Theme: Citizenship for a Diverse & Just World

Explore the history of the Weimar Republic and of Nazi Germany through the literature, film, music, visual arts and design produced between 1918 and 1945. We will be uncovering the roots of fascism and looking also at its echoes in works created in post-Nazi Germany. What can the cultural products tell us that the history books can’t? Were the 1920s really the golden age of German cinema? How did the arts change after the Nazis came to power in 1933? Why did the Nazis burn books and call certain artistic styles “degenerate”?
Taught in English. Meets Film Studies' Pre-1950s requirement.

German/Scandvn 3354 • From Viking Saga to Climate Fiction: Nature in Nordic and Germanic Literatures

Mergenthaler | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

GEN Theme: Sustainability

This course explores how literature and culture––including, among others, traditional art forms, popular culture, folklore, lifestyle, social customs, and political culture––are deeply intertwined with our relationship toward nature and our natural and cultural environments, including forests, oceans, mountains, parks, and rural and urban spaces. It explores how environmental sustainability is conceived, represented, and reflected in the literatures of Nordic and German-speaking countries (Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany), from the medieval period to the present. The rich and diverse literatures and cultures of these countries may help explain their intense engagement with current global environmental issues and strategies for sustainability, from climate change and biodiversity loss to ocean acidification and soil erosion.

Representations and concepts of nature and environmental sustainability will be studied in a variety of literary genres, with different thematic emphases, and from different methodological angles. Literary genres include medieval sagas; Gothic Romantic tales; 19^th-century fairy tales (e.g., “Snow Queen” that inspired Disney’s Frozen); the modernist novel; graphic novel; poetry; essay; and science-fiction, both dystopian and utopian; and TV series. Thematic emphases encompass the cultivation of Iceland; the landscape of war; witchcraft and the magic of nature; urbanization and the destruction of nature; back-to-nature movements; the fascist instrumentalization of nature; nature and memory; the reality and imagination of nuclear disaster and pollution; the philosophy of Deep Ecology; dystopia and utopia in the age of climate change and fears of irreversible environmental damage. Finally, research methods that the instructor introduces in class and that students apply, in particular, in their final research essays include narratology, rhetorical analysis, and gender and postcolonial studies as well as Environmental Humanities and Ecocriticism.

All readings available in English; taught in English.

German 4600 • History of the German Language - Senior Seminar in German: Topics in Linguistics / Language 

Grotans | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

In this course we will investigate the development of the German language over the past ca. 1500 years with a look both at structural changes as well as the cultural contexts in which they took place. Why is it gehen-ging, but machen-machte? Whence that pesky "dative-n"? Why are adjective endings so complicated? You'll also learn how to read older forms of German and practice your new skills in Thompson Library's Rare Books Room, where we'll spend a good deal of time looking at manuscripts and other forms of primary evidence including early printed books and handwritten letters.

Germanic and medieval beginnings
Printing and Other Revolutions
Forming a Standard Language
19th-Century Language and Nation
20th-Century Language in Crisis
21st-Century Globalization and Inclusion

Taught in German.

German 4603 • Translation II

Reitter | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

German-English/English-German translation; focus on translating different text types and genres (including literature, non-fiction, journalism, etc.); emphasis on improvement of style; discussion of major theories of translation. The course will culminate in a group project, in which students will produce a text for publication.
Prereq: 2102 and 3603, or equiv, or permission of instructor.

Scandinavian

Scandvn/German 3354 • From Viking Saga to Climate Fiction: Nature in Nordic and Germanic Literatures

Mergenthaler | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

GEN Theme: Sustainability

This course explores how literature and culture––including, among others, traditional art forms, popular culture, folklore, lifestyle, social customs, and political culture––are deeply intertwined with our relationship toward nature and our natural and cultural environments, including forests, oceans, mountains, parks, and rural and urban spaces. It explores how environmental sustainability is conceived, represented, and reflected in the literatures of Nordic and German-speaking countries (Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany), from the medieval period to the present. The rich and diverse literatures and cultures of these countries may help explain their intense engagement with current global environmental issues and strategies for sustainability, from climate change and biodiversity loss to ocean acidification and soil erosion.

Representations and concepts of nature and environmental sustainability will be studied in a variety of literary genres, with different thematic emphases, and from different methodological angles. Literary genres include medieval sagas; Gothic Romantic tales; 19^th-century fairy tales (e.g., “Snow Queen” that inspired Disney’s Frozen); the modernist novel; graphic novel; poetry; essay; and science-fiction, both dystopian and utopian; and TV series. Thematic emphases encompass the cultivation of Iceland; the landscape of war; witchcraft and the magic of nature; urbanization and the destruction of nature; back-to-nature movements; the fascist instrumentalization of nature; nature and memory; the reality and imagination of nuclear disaster and pollution; the philosophy of Deep Ecology; dystopia and utopia in the age of climate change and fears of irreversible environmental damage. Finally, research methods that the instructor introduces in class and that students apply, in particular, in their final research essays include narratology, rhetorical analysis, and gender and postcolonial studies as well as Environmental Humanities and Ecocriticism.

All readings available in English; taught in English.

Scandinavian 5150 • Introduction to Old Norse-Icelandic

Kaplan | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

This course is an intensive introduction to the grammar of the Old Norse-Icelandic language. Students will learn crucial morphology and prepare translations of excerpts from medieval Icelandic sagas and other texts. The diligent student will gain the skills to read normalized Old Norse texts of intermediate difficulty on their own with the aid of a dictionary.

This course complements Scandinavian 3350: Norse Mythology and Medieval Culture, Scandinavian 5251: The Icelandic Saga, and the Swedish language sequence beginning with Swedish 1101. It may also be of interest to students of Old English language and literature.

Text: Geir T. Zoëga, ed. A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic. University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Prerequisites: None. However, a working knowledge of Swedish, German, Old English or another Germanic language is extremely helpful. Familiarity with case languages such as Latin may also be useful. Students who have never studied any foreign language are advised to postpone enrollment in this course until they have done so.

Swedish

Swedish 1102 • Swedish II

Risko | 4 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

GEN World Languages
GEL Foreign Language
Development of skills necessary for the independent use of Swedish.  Discussions, presentations, writing and listening/viewing activities address topics of contemporary Sweden.
Prereq: Grade of C- or better in 1101. Not open to native speakers of this language through regular course enrollment or EM credit. GE for Lang Course.
Text: Althén, Anette. Mål 2 Lärobok (textbook with CD); Althén, Anette. Mål Övningsbok (workbook). Both Stockholm: Natur och Kultur (2007 edition).

Yiddish

Yiddish 1102 • Yiddish 2

tba | 4 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

  GEN World Languages
  GEL Foreign Language course

The course is designed to help you learn to communicate in culturally informed ways in Yiddish. It will help you develop balanced skills in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. In addition to completing exercises in the textbook In eynem: A Communicative Approach to Yiddish, we will read short texts by writers such as Sholem Aleichem and Anna Margolin and excerpts from contemporary Hasidic publications and from the recent Yiddish translation of Harry Potter.    

Prereq: 1101. This course is available for EM credit. 

Yiddish 3399 • The Holocaust in Yiddish and Ashkenazic Literature

tba | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

  GEL Literature
  GEL Diversity: Global Studies
 *possible GEN in spring for “Citizenship for a Just and Diverse World” with a title change, "The Holocaust in Yiddish Literature and Film"  

About six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II in a series of events that came to be known as the Holocaust or, in Yiddish, as the “khurbn” (“destruction”). While Yiddish was the first language of millions of the victims, the contributions of Yiddish speakers to the documentation and representation of the Holocaust have often been forgotten or effaced. In this course, we will learn about the systematic destruction of Yiddish culture, but we will also consider how Yiddish-language writers, artists, intellectuals, and filmmakers documented and resisted that destruction.

In class discussions and assignments, we will analyze texts, films, and other media produced during and after the Holocaust and consider how these materials, written in or incorporating a language that was itself victimized, open up different perspectives on a seemingly well-known history. We will also consider how these materials might shed light on ongoing debates about justice and restitution, the representation of violence, and cultural memory. In addition to serving as an introduction to the academic study of the Holocaust and Yiddish culture, this course will familiarize students with research methods and techniques in the humanities.  

All readings and discussion in English. No prior knowledge of the subject or language is expected or required. 

Not open to students with credit for 399 or German 399 or German 3252.01 or 3252.02. GEL lit and diversity global studies course.

Scandinavian 5150 • Introduction to Old Norse-Icelandic

Kaplan | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2024

This course is an intensive introduction to the grammar of the Old Norse-Icelandic language. Students will learn crucial morphology and prepare translations of excerpts from medieval Icelandic sagas and other texts. The diligent student will gain the skills to read normalized Old Norse texts of intermediate difficulty on their own with the aid of a dictionary.

This course complements Scandinavian 3350: Norse Mythology and Medieval Culture, Scandinavian 5251: The Icelandic Saga, and the Swedish language sequence beginning with Swedish 1101. It may also be of interest to students of Old English language and literature.

Text: Geir T. Zoëga, ed. A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic. University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Prerequisites: None. However, a working knowledge of Swedish, German, Old English or another Germanic language is extremely helpful. Familiarity with case languages such as Latin may also be useful. Students who have never studied any foreign language are advised to postpone enrollment in this course until they have done so.

German 6601 • Teaching Practicum

Uskokovic | 1 credit unit | ARR |  Spring Semester 2024

This course is for GTAs who are teaching a 1000-level German language class. The course provides graduate students with instruction and practice in designing and implementing instructional materials for their undergraduate classes. It offers best practices in creating tests, developing speaking portfolios, designing culture components, and becoming reflective practitioners.
Prereq: Grad standing, and permission of instructor. Repeatable to a maximum of 10 cr hrs. This course is graded S/U.

German 8200 • Approaches to German Colonialism - Seminar in Literature and Literary Culture

Aupiais | 3 credit units | Mondays 8:10 - 10:55 am | Spring Semester 2024

In recent years, the cultural and literary history of colonialism in the German-speaking world has become increasingly central both for scholars working on central Europe in the broad span between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries (including not just the Kaiserreich period, but also, on account of colonial irredentism, the Weimar period, and on account of the “continuity thesis”, National-Socialism) as well as intellectuals interested in contemporary German society.

Today, debates around Raubkunst and restitution, reparations and foreign aid, memory culture and public space, but also immigration, systemic racism, European integration, globalization, and economic inequality all draw from discussions of Germany’s colonial legacies. Focusing on the role of literature and writing, this course will review touchstones in the historical construction of German colonial culture and analyze contemporary post- and decolonial responses. We will also consider the interactions between literature and photography, art, film, journalism, and scientific discourse in these contexts.

Texts in German; taught in English. Authors may include: Frieda von Bülow, Hendrik Witbooi, Hans Grimm, Heiner Müller, Uwe Timm, Ilija Trojanow, Urs Widmer, Christian Kracht, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Alexander Kluge, Mithu Sanyal, among others.

Prereq: Grad standing, or permission of instructor.

German 8300 • The Modified & Mutilated Body of Weimar Germany: The Works of Otto Dix  - Seminar in Intellectual History and Cultural Studies 

Porter | 3 credit units | Mondays 1:15 - 4:00pm | Spring Semester 2024

The oeuvre of Otto Dix will be used to guide graduate students through the evolving and turbulent shifts in body politics and policing of the Weimar Era. This course begins by discussing the destruction of WWI and its impact on the German psyche as it was worked through and depicted by the bodies of war veterans and Weimar civilians. Coupled with the exploration of shifting considerations of the body of the early 20^th century are the topics of female sexual liberation, gender performance and expression, and health. 

Prereq: Grad standing, or permission of instructor.

German 8500 • Doctoral Colloquium

Mergenthaler | 1 credit unit | ARR |  Spring Semester 2024

Regular student-driven discussions of ongoing dissertations, current topics in the professional field, and new research approaches to Germanic Studies.
Prereq: Successful completion of Ph.D. candidacy exams or permission from Director of Graduate Studies and instructor. Repeatable to a maximum of 9 cr hrs. This course is graded S/U. Admis Cond course.

German 8600 • Multilingualism: Language in a changing global world - Seminar in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics

Taleghani-Nikazm | 3 credit units | Thursdays 2:15-5:15pm | Spring Semester 2024

This course will count towards the GIS in Second Language Studies.

Multilingualism is the norm, not the exception. Individuals have a large number of linguistic resources at their disposal consisting of more than one variety of languages, styles, genres, and accents. This seminar offers an introduction to the many facets of multilingualism in a changing global world. In this seminar, we begin with the key question of what multilingualism actually is and examine the role that languages play in multilingual societies from a social and cultural perspective. We systematically explore multilingualism with respect to individual, institutions, cities, nations, and cyberspace and discuss how in each of these domains, the dynamics of language choice are undergoing changes as a result of economic, political, and cultural forces.  In addition, we examine research methods for investigating multilingualism and engage critically with questions and findings. Topics include language contact, maintenance and loss, endangered languages, language planning and politics, multilingual and heritage language education, urban youth language, and language and identities. We will explore these topics and phenomena based on examples form several language groups, including German language varieties, and you will be able to apply concepts to other languages and language varieties.

Discussions and readings are in English. All readings and other materials will be available on Carmen course site. 

Prereq: Grad standing, or permission of instructor.